The Side Mission began in 2009 as the pet project of Chris Vandergaag, a Vancouver-based writer and editor, who contributes regularly to tech/gaming sections at The Georgia Straight, and Canoe.ca. His work also appears on the Sun Media network of daily newspaper websites, which include The Toronto Sun, The Calgary Sun, The Ottawa Sun, The London Free Press and others.

However, The Side Mission is a collaborative effort; a number of talented people have helped breathe life into it:

We love games. Playing them and talking about them and collecting them and, when they’re original NES game paks, blowing on them. We love gaming and always will. Probably. Maybe next week we’ll become obsessed with building tiny ships in bottles. But probably not.

The Side Mission also aims to connect with gamers who believe their gaming tastes to be more ‘adult’ and refined than they used to be, as well as to those desperately clinging to youth. For we find these traits cohabitate nicely… why, they’re often found in the same person.

The Side Mission is not just another gaming news and review site—there are already dozens of review and news websites, many of which are better financed than this one. For example, IGN is a unit of Fox and Gamespot is CBS… they get early access to everything, and have the resources to send reporters to Japan to spy on Shigeru Miyamoto while he eats breakfast. Only idiots would try to directly compete with enormous media outlets and offer identical services.

So, while The Side Mission will recommend games and talk about the industry, and while I am an idiot, we’re still going a different route.